‘Get!’ Langton said suddenly, crept up against my ear. ‘Girl, get!’ I felt a squeeze at my temples, cold as Langton’s calipers, and looked up and saw that a boat was waiting. I leaned forward, sucked in the breath that hammered back into me, and followed him into it.

Chapter Nine

The anti-slavers are always asking me, what was done to you, Frances? How did you suffer? They don’t believe any of it could have been done to you unless you were forced. I remember a thing Phibbah used to say: Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.

What would they say if I told them I pinned my own self to Langton, even after we came here? That I was the one who followed him? Oh, how they’d leap away! Uncommon, unlikely. But true. They only concern themselves with flesh and bone, as if those are the only things that suffer. As if minds don’t.

I glowered at Langton’s back from the bench behind. The river lumbered beneath us, the boat’s slow rocking reminding me of a mule-cart. I felt each pull of the oars tugging me backwards, felt the anger pour into me hot as gin. London sped past me as if I was losing it.

We got off near the Strand, walked the rest of the way to Covent Garden, where Langton was meeting the man called Pomfrey at a public house. We found him leaning back in his chair, cheeks bristling with pale whiskers, hands locked together above his gut. Ale foamed like fresh cow’s milk above his lip. The room was dim and crowded, each table lit by a greasy candle. Crowded with tobacco and the smells of men. Exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a creature like Pomfrey. When he saw Langton, he looked up, face leathery as a lung. ‘My God, man, what happened to you?’

‘Twenty years.’ Langton braced his wrists, eased himself into a seat.

‘That long, eh?’ A slow whistle. ‘And who’s this?’

‘My house-girl.’

‘Oho. I heard about this one!’ Pomfrey gave a wet chuckle. ‘Heard you’ve been squeezing more out of her than the usual tricks. Can’t leave home without her, eh? You colonials! You do things the way a man should.’

I’d heard about Pomfrey, too. He was a skull-chaser. The abolition law had spawned men like him. Whatever he’d made as a slaver he’d doubled, dodging the English navy across the Atlantic, slippery as butter on hot bread, still using the same fleet of old Guineamen. ‘Bastards only managed to scupper me once, but they found us clean as a whistle, didn’t they? A very well-scrubbed brig they said to me, at pains to point it out. “Aye, well, I run a tight one, and surely one navy man won’t fault another for that,” I told them.’

The skulls he’d shipped to Paradise had arrived in wooden crates, packed in straw, labels tied through the eyeholes with pink ribbons. There’d been a man from Madagascar, bullet hole through the jaw. A female Hottentot with a perfect set of teeth strung like pearls. I can still see them, set out in their rows. In death, as in life, each man cohabited only with the same type. Caucasian with Caucasian, Mongolians side by side, Malays, Americans. Negroes on the bottom. One of my jobs was to measure volume, fill them with white mustard seed, which I then poured back into marked cylinders.